Sex and Disability
If you’re disabled, you might know what it feels like to live in crip time. Defined variously by disability theorists like Alison Kafer, Margaret Price and Ellen Samuels, crip time is the non-normative experience of time when you are disabled. In Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time, Samuels describes crip time as follows:
Disability and illness have the power to extract us from linear, progressive time with its normative life stages and cast us into a wormhole of backward and forward acceleration, jerky stops and starts, tedious intervals and abrupt endings.
If I imagine the linear, progressive time Samuels describes, I imagine a line running from the left to the right, constantly pushing forward through the years. It is punctuated by major life events that form a coherent narrative, such as work, marriage and childbirth. We begin at point A when we are born and hit point B when we die, having completed our assigned life events in the right order - this is commonly seen as A Life Well Lived.
Disability is not part of this time. As described by crip time, disability throws the normative milestones and notions of progress into disarray. Samuels’ example of this is her experience of using a water therapy pool in their 20s, surrounded by older adults in their 60s and beyond, and watching her age mates doing laps in the next pool over. She found that her disability had thrown her forward in time, rendering her body comparable to someone in their 60s.
I am sometimes disabled and sometimes live in crip time, which can be confusing to those who see disability as a permanent state one is either in or out of. The truth is more in line with what Susan Sontag wrote in Illness as Metaphor:
Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.
While we all hold dual citizenship (which we use more frequently as we age), I tend to visit the kingdom of the sick more often than my peers. My body feels more porous and malleable than the stocky, healthy bodies around me, and more like an medieval body with unbalanced humours than an endlessly productive 21st century one.
Last year I wrote about about my relationship with chronic pain and sexual pain and while I live with significantly less chronic pain now, I have lived with chronic illness my whole life. This messily manifests as frequent coughs, colds, brain fog, tachycardia, muscle pain and exhaustion, forming a kind of undiagnosable malaise that I summarise as chronic fatigue.
My latest bout has left me largely housebound for a week, lying in bed on a Friday night while my friends go partying - thrown forward in crip time.
This year the grief of suddenly losing my dad has exacerbated my frequent maladies. An impaired immune system during grief is normal, but I often feel like my mind and body are a computer trying to operate while enormous, memory-draining malware is running in the background. It has forced me to slow down and slink sullenly back into crip time when I wanted to speed away from bodily weakness as quickly as possible.
While there has been an large amount of good work done to destigmatise disabled sex and reframe disabled people as desiring and desirable human beings, fucking in crip time can be hard. Sex is usually energy-consuming and my sickbed doesn't feel very sexy; my sick body has historically felt less like a desirable collaborator and more like a broken piece of machinery. The normative idea of good sex is energetic with strong, quick bodies frequently changing positions and fucking for hours. When I am disabled, this is an impossible dream.
Grief and disability weave together, as Samuels writes: “Crip time is grief time. It is a time of loss, and of the crushing undertow that accompanies loss.” It is mourning for the normative body you once had, or perhaps never had - the feeling I get when friends talk about who they fucked at a party I couldn’t attend is the same feeling I get when friends talk about seeing their dads after losing mine. I sense that my life has tailed off from the expected norms and I live in a different place than my peers. Sontag’s kingdom of the sick has opened its borders to all forms of loss.
It would be easy to frame this loss and grief and sickness as a tragedy. In the cultural imagination disabled people have two options: the tragedy or the supercrip. Disability theorist Eli Clare describes the supercrip in his essay The Mountain:
The nondisabled world is saturated with these stories: stories about gimps who engage in activities as grand as walking 2,500 miles or as mundane as learning to drive. They focus on disabled people "overcoming" our disabilities. They reinforce the superiority of the nondisabled body and mind. They turn individual disabled people, who are simply leading their lives, into symbols of inspiration.
The disabled person is always measured against their ability to appear non-disabled. If you can “overcome” disability to do things considered the realm of the non-disabled, you are held up as supercrip. The moment your impairment means you depart from the norm, you are a tragedy. You are always a metaphor for the non-disabled.
I am not tragic, nor am I superhuman. Disability, grief and loss disrupt linear time and the expected rate of things, including how often I have sex and how I do it. This is not a bad thing. It can be frustrating and challenging to work on a different timeframe than my peers, but its limitations open a realm of negotiation and play that is foundational to my idea of sexual pleasure.
It has forced me to reckon with unspoken sexual expectations and to speak them out - to say “No, I cannot do what your other partners do, but I can do this instead if you like” or “No, I can’t do that today at all, but I still find you really hot and want to do that when I’m feeling better.” A dialogue is started where there was none before and a connection is made. Ideally sex becomes collaborative, disappointment is discussed and solutions are found.
When I can’t engage in sex in a consistently normative way, it is hard for it to be transactional. This can make things like Grindr hookups more difficult, where transactionality is often the goal, but it also allows me to step back from what I learned about sex growing up - namely that it is something you endure to make someone else happy. I cannot promise consistency with how often I have sex or when, so I can’t always uphold my end of the bargain. I have had to learn how to say no. This is a good thing.
Fucking and living in crip time is slower, but I'm beginning to accept and embrace this and value the dialogue and community it creates. The people I sleep with are responsive to my needs, my colleagues know I have chronic illness and I work from home (or don’t work at all) when I need to, and my friends come over to my house to cook dinner and help me clean up.
I listen to my body more often and hear it when it tells me to slow down.To accept things as they are takes a long time. It is another place where disability and grief overlap, and sometimes the rage of what I’ve lost feels like I’m drowning. Sometimes, though - whether it’s surrounded by friends who came over to cook, or a colleague video calling because they miss me in the office, or a partner asking me if I’m okay during sex, it feels like love. It is care flowing between us and knowing that when one of us is sick or grieving we will show up for them.
My fatigue is receding at the moment (I would not be able to write this essay if it wasn’t) and I’m reentering normative time. I went out for lunch yesterday and I’m going for a short walk today, looking at the outside world like a hermit coming out of a cave. I am hoping to take some slow, delicious crip time with me. Linear time wasn’t working for me anyway.
Looking at Porn is written around my full time job working on inequalities in medical research. I hope you enjoy it. If you do, you can tip me on Ko-Fi here. I’m not on social media at the moment, but you can email me at robinccraig@gmail.com if you like.
One of my favourite pieces of writing on chronic fatigue syndrome is A Sudden Illness by Laura Hillenbrand, published in The New Yorker. My chronic fatigue is very mild compared to Hillenbrand’s, but the description of crip fatigue time is resonant - “The realm of possibility began and ended in that room, on that bed. I no longer imagined anything else. If I was asked what month it was, I had to think for a while before I could answer.”
A particularly potent supercripping that always stays in my mind is the Channel 4 paralympics advert “Meet the Superhumans”. The camera gazes up and down the disabled bodies, the advert is punctuated by moments of tragedy (the bomb exploding, the weeping parents by the ultrasound, the car crash) that the disabled athletes have overcome to achieve supercrip status to the soundtrack of “Harder Than You Think” by Public Enemy.
Being able to work from home is where disability and class intersect. Samuels described in Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time how academia was the only career path that could accommodate her disability as she could work from home or the classroom floor - those who cannot access careers like this are often thrown into the violence of the UK benefits system where thousands of people have died after being declared fit to work. An in-depth read on the UK government’s persecution of the disabled is available via Disability News Service here.